Introduction

I was only 19 when I learned that my father was
dying of a rare and incurable disease. The doctors
couldn't tell us much about the illness. At first they
thought it was tuberculosis, possibly a carryover from
his days in concentration camps, but the doctors soon
ruled that out. Finally, they called it diffuse
pulmonary interstitial fibrosis--merely a description
of symptoms. The doctors didn't know what had caused
his disease, nor did they know how to treat it. All
they could tell us was that he would die of suffocation
very soon. What the Nazis couldn't do in over five
years, fate would take care of in a few short months.

I did much thinking in those last few months
before my father died. Dad meant more to me than
anyone else in the world. I remember sitting in the
hospital waiting room in the last days--a thousand
thoughts racing through my mind. Why is he dying? Why
haven't I been closer to him? Why haven't I spent more
time with him? Why didn't I go to Israel with him when
he wanted me to? Why didn't I learn more about him?
Why? Why? Why!

I guess I was as close to my father as the average
American teenager, but that wasn't enough. My father
was dying, and my world was collapsing around me.

I had been too busy trying to fit in with other
teenagers to really get to know my dad. I loved him so
much, but I hadn't told him that in years because I was
"too big" for all of that. Now, more than anything, I
wanted to tell Dad that I loved him, and I wasn't even
sure that he would know I was there.

I walked into the room. Dad was a pitiful sight.
He was under an oxygen tent. His body was extremely
thin, with tubes sticking in his arms, his chest and
his nose. He had cuts all over from the many biopsies
the doctors had performed to study the disease. He was
breathing hard, but very little oxygen was getting into
his bloodstream. He hadn't responded to us in days.
He looked much like he must have looked after
liberation from the concentration camps. Once again,
he was merely a shell of a human being.

Amazingly, he looked up and recognized me. "Hello son,"
he said meekly.

"Hi Dad," I replied in joy. Now
was my chance, but I couldn't get the words out of my
mouth. They were pounding in my consciousness--I LOVE
YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! They stayed locked
inside until I was about to explode. Why couldn't I
get them out? Finally, I said it. "I love you Dad."
After all that agonizing, the words seemed so easy to
say as they softly left my lips. Those little words
can mean so much. He heard--and he understood.

"I love you too, son," he whispered as he squeezed
my hand and looked at me through the transparent wall
of the oxygen tent. That moment felt so good. He died
just a few hours later. There were a million things I
wished I had said to him and done with him. At least,
I had told him that I loved him.

My father, Abram Korn, survived over five years in
Nazi concentration camps and ghettos. He left the
camps, but the memories never left him. He tried to
block them out, but couldn't. Many years after the
war, they would still come to the surface in his
dreams. I remember waking to his screams in the night;
I knew that he'd had another nightmare. My mother, my
brother, my sister and I would be in the camps with him
in those terrifying dreams. My father suffered with
insomnia for all of his adult life. As much as he
wanted to sleep, he was afraid that he would just wake
up--back in the camps.

Dad started writing his memoirs in 1969, 24 years
after his liberation. He would meet as often as he
could with a dear friend of the family, Jack Wyland,
and our rabbi, Benjamin Rosayn. Jack had been trying
to get Dad to write his story for many years, and he
had finally convinced him. Writing his memoirs was
like therapy for my father. He was finally releasing
what he had kept locked away for most of his life. He
began to sleep better, and the nightmares began to
subside. He began to live easier.

Dad, Jack, and Rabbi Rosayn would try to meet
weekly to work on the book, but they would sometimes
skip months at a time. They either recorded the
sessions on tape or wrote them out, and another friend,
Mary Lou Helmly, typed them. Soon Mary Lou convinced
them that she could type as fast as Dad could talk, so
she began to join them. Whatever they could accomplish
in one evening together would become one chapter.
There were originally 36 chapters, representing 36
sessions. The shortest chapter was less than three
pages long; the longest was 15. I have combined many
of the chapters and separated others to end up with 18
chapters.

Even though I'm sure my father didn't plan it this
way, I found it quite interesting that there were
originally 36 chapters, because the numbers 18 and 36
have special meanings in Judaism. Each letter in the Hebrew
alphabet has a number ascribed to it. The word
"life" in Hebrew is expressed as Chai and is
represented by the number 18, the sum total of the
numbers ascribed to each Hebrew letter. The number 36
represents double-Chai. It is said that the world is
perpetually sustained by 36 righteous people living on
earth. When one dies, another is born. For thousands
of years, Chai, or 18, has been used to express our
faith and prayer that the Eternal will bestow the
blessing of Life upon us. My father's story is about
life, not death. If Abe's Story couldn't have Dad's
original 36 chapters, I made sure that it would have
18, to represent life.

On January 12, 1972, Dad met with Jack to work on
Chapter 35. This was their first session in over five
months, and they were almost to the end of the story.
Jack died suddenly, 12 days later. By the time Dad
wrote the last chapter in late April, he was already
beginning to feel the first symptoms of his illness.
He died on August 7, 1972, one day after my parents'
twenty-third wedding anniversary.

Dad had apparently fulfilled his purpose on earth,
at least part of which was the writing of his memoirs.
Dad clearly defined his purpose in writing his story in
the Dedication: "...to show my own children and whoever
reads this book why I feel so grateful to be part of
this great country, the USA." Like so many other
immigrants to this country from oppressed societies, he
never took his freedom in America for granted. He
loved America like no native ever could, because he
knew what it was like to live in a world without the
freedom we enjoy here.

I take Dad's purpose a step further. I am joining
with the continuing worldwide efforts to ensure that
the memories of the camps stay alive so the world will
NEVER FORGET. Editing and publishing Abe's Story is my
small way of preserving a bit of history, to remind the
world of what we allowed to happen such a short time
ago.

It saddens me deeply to know that similar
tragedies are occurring on earth today. Why does the
world allow such inhumanity when we know all too well
what happened in Europe just 50 short years ago? Have
we forgotten already? Too many people in the world
don't even know what the Holocaust was. Some even try
to convince others that it never happened. We must
work to change that. The best way to do that is
through the documentation of personal testimonies of the survivors.

It is extremely important for all living survivors
to record their stories in whatever forms possible.
World War II ended 50 years ago. There are only about
350,000 survivors alive today. They are getting old.
How many will be alive in 10 years? In 20 years? In
30? All too soon, the survivors will be gone, so we
must have their recorded testimonies to keep their
memories alive. Whether survivor accounts are written,
made into books, stored in computers, video taped, or
recorded on audio tape, they must be preserved.

I had read some of Dad's manuscript as he was
writing it. After he died, I began reading it several
times, but never read it straight through. Several
years later, as I was beginning to settle into adult
life, I finally picked up the manuscript to read it
from cover to cover. Reading it had a powerful impact
on me. I felt closer to Dad than I ever had before,
and he was no longer by my side. I began to understand
what was so special about my father, and I was thankful
that he had left his story for me, for my family, and
for everyone else to read.

I first became interested in having Abe's Story
published in the early 80's, after Rabbi Chaim Wender
asked me to teach a religious school class on the
Holocaust. It embarrassed me to tell him that I really
didn't know much about the Holocaust. Sadly, detailed
information about the Holocaust wasn't taught in public
schools (and still isn't, for the most part), and I
didn't even learn about it in religious school. Rabbi
Wender said, "You know your father's book, don't you?
That's enough." I have been teaching a Holocaust class
to eighth and ninth grade students every year since
then. We alternate reading and discussing Abe's Story
and Elie Wiesel's extraordinary book, Night. We also
discuss current events, comparing them to what happened
during the Holocaust and to events in pre-war Europe.

Every year, my students would ask, "When are you
going to have your father's book published?"

Every year, I would reply, "Someday, I'll create
the time to work with it ... someday."

I knew this was a task that I would have to take
on myself. It was just too difficult for my mother to
deal with. My father's death had devastated her, and
she never did get over it. My brother and sister just
weren't as involved with the manuscript and with
Holocaust issues as I was. It was up to me, and I
wanted it that way. It was 1993 before I created time
in my life to dedicate to revising and publishing the
book. Someday was here.

I scheduled a trip to Europe with my wife, Jill,
and my son in honor of Jason's Bar Mitzvah, that
special time in every Jewish boy's life when he is old
enough to accept the responsibilities of a Jewish man.
The main purpose of the trip was to visit some of the
concentration camps where Dad had been imprisoned.
Jill and I wanted to get more in touch with what my
father had gone through as we were beginning to work
with his manuscript.

Our first stop was Warsaw, Poland. We were
typical tourists, with too much baggage, and we were
too careless with our valuables. A thief picked my
pocket and stole all our cash. Luckily we still had our
traveler's checks and credit cards. We just stayed on
the train and headed to Krakow for our trip to
Auschwitz.

We were naturally stunned at being robbed, on the
first day of our pilgrimage to retrace some of my
father's steps. It was all we could do to regain our
composure. Once we settled down, I realized how
fitting it was that we had been robbed in Warsaw, just
60 miles from my father's birthplace. Wasn't my father
robbed of all of his possessions, as well as his
freedom? Weren't his family and millions of others
robbed of everything they held dear? Their very lives?
Now we were on a train, headed for Auschwitz, like Dad
and so many others had been. Of course the
circumstances were much different, but it seemed so
fitting.

We arrived in Krakow and took a cab to our hotel.
Everything seemed so foreign to us. It was early
April, but the spring growth had not yet begun. There
were no flowers and no leaves on the trees. Everything
looked black and desolate from years of pollution by
the local coal industry. When we finally saw the
Holiday Inn sign, where we would stay, we almost cried
with joy. It was wonderful to recognize something from
home.

The next morning we hired a car and a driver for
the day to take us to Auschwitz and to Birkenau. We
learned from our driver that Steven Spielberg was in
Krakow winding up the filming of Schindler's List.
This was the first we had heard of it. Steven
Spielberg! Making a Holocaust movie! Yes, the timing
was right.

Our visit to Auschwitz was meaningful, but it was
not as overwhelming as we had expected it to be. We
had prepared ourselves for our visits to the camps by
reading Konnilyn Feig's excellent book, Hitler's
Death Camps. Jill and I both agreed with Feig's
observation: Everything was too sterile. To visit
Auschwitz on a guided tour through such a lifeless,
clean, and orderly place took something away from
the experience. We learned much, but we just didn't
feel. Why didn't we feel?

Our visit to Birkenau, just a few kilometers away,
was somehow different. There was only one person in an
office at the entrance. She didn't even notice us.
There were no guides, no exhibits, no souvenir
shop--just Birkenau. Sure, it had been cleaned up.
The knee-deep mud, written about in almost every
Birkenau survivor's memoir, was now just hard dirt--and
ashes, of course--with blades of grass trying to grow
through. It was, however, much more like the Nazis had
left it than was Auschwitz. Birkenau was real.

Birkenau held a huge expanse of chimneys, the
remains of the burned down horse stables that the Nazis
had converted into barracks. A few of the barracks
were still standing. We walked into one of them. A
system of wooden bunks had been constructed to house
about 25 people in each stall, originally built for no
more than three horses. There were 38 of these stalls
in each of the barracks, housing up to 1000 people. At
one point, there were 300 such barracks at Birkenau,
some constructed of brick rather than wood. They held
up to 300,000 prisoners, each one waiting to be
exterminated.

Jill and Jason walked back to the car. They'd had
enough for our first day. I walked to the infamous
railroad landing platform, where millions of souls who had
survived the awful cattle trains finally stepped out
into oblivion. I could see a train pull up in my
mind's eye, with its inhabitants spilling out on the
ground after traveling for days without food, water,
toilet facilities, and without fresh air. I could hear
the barks of the police dogs and the angry shouts of
the Nazis as they herded the transport of Jews into
lines, passing them through the "selection," with
shouts of "Links" or "Rechts," "left"
or "right." One
direction meant life--for a while. The other meant a
short walk to the gas chambers and the crematories.

I had an eerie feeling as I walked to the back of
the camp, where the crematories once stood. I knew my
father had once walked these steps. I knew that the
ashes of millions of innocents were in this sacred
ground. I could smell a burning stench in the air that
grew stronger as I neared the demolished crematories.
Was the odor from the crematories, still lingering there
after all these years, or was it from a more current
industrial source? Either way, it was quite fitting
for my visit. Now I knew what I was feeling as I
walked through the camps--nothingness.

We visited several more camps, but I still felt
the same way. A good friend of ours, Susanna Capelouto,
met us at Buchenwald. Susanna was born and raised in Germany,
but she now lives in Atlanta. She wanted to visit
Buchenwald with us to gather material for a documentary on Abe's
Story
she was producing for Peach State (Georgia) Public
Radio. By "chance," we planned our visit to Buchenwald
on April 11, 1993, the forty-eighth anniversary of the
liberation of the prisoners held there, including my
father. Thousands of visitors were present for the
ceremonies, including many survivors. We toured the camp, and I had much the
same feeling I'd had at the other camps--nothingness.

Susanna walked up to me with her tape recorder,
after recording a discussion with my son. She put the
microphone up to my face and asked, "What are you
feeling as you walk through Buchenwald?"

Immediately, I understood why I was feeling
nothingness. It wasn't that I felt nothing; I felt
nothingness. That was a hint to me about what the
prisoners must have had to feel if they wanted to
survive. My father had written about it. They had to
shut down their feelings and their emotions. They had
to let their humanness fall away. How could they
survive their torturous treatment and the inhumanity
they suffered if they let themselves feel--if they let
themselves smell--if they let themselves care? They
had to reduce their feelings to nothingness. They had
to detach themselves from what they were experiencing.
Only then, could they survive the camps. I shared my
feelings with Susanna.

Our visits to the camps had been worthwhile,
helping us to get more "in touch" with the world my
father had to live in. Thankfully, we do not have to
live in that world today, although, in some places on
earth, that world is very much alive. Just look at the
world news on television, and you'll see it.
Concentration camps in the former Yugoslavia. Millions
starving to death in Africa. Bulldozers pushing
thousands of corpses into mass graves in Rwanda.
Hatred and oppression never seem to end. Hopefully,
our children and our children's children will never
have to experience for themselves what my father, his
family and so many millions of Jews, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Gypsies, homosexuals and other innocent
people had to live through--and die through. I say
"hopefully" because the possibility of such a nightmare
still exists today. It is a very real threat that we
must all be aware of. It only takes a closer look at
history to understand why.

Hitler took advantage of a deep undercurrent of
anti-Semitism, prevalent throughout Europe, to turn the
people against the Jews. He took advantage of a
collapsing economy, with hyper-inflation and rapidly
rising unemployment, to climb to the top of the
political ladder. German money was worthless. The
German people literally needed suitcases full of money
to buy groceries. They were desperate. Soon,
conditions seemed to get better, and Hitler's power
diminished. Then the Great Depression hit, and the
German economy suffered again. Hitler promised a job
for every man, and he blamed the Jews. He promised
bread on every plate, and he blamed the Jews. He
promised a Volkswagen in every garage, and he blamed
the Jews. He promised and promised and promised, and
he blamed and blamed and blamed. Hitler was a master
at manipulating the masses. To them, he was a savior.
To millions of other innocent people, he was the
Destroyer.

Don't we have similar conditions in the world
today? Don't we have rising anti-Semitism? Don't we
have hyper-inflation and economic disaster in many
countries? Didn't our own government recently have a partial
shut-down, with talk of a possible default?

Many people are greatly concerned about our own
economic situation in America today. Harry Figgie, Jr.
was chairman of the Grace Commission under President
Reagan. The members of the Grace Commission were
charged with looking for ways to eliminate government
waste. Figgie was shocked at what he learned about our
government and our economy. In his amazing book,
Bankruptcy 1995, Figgie explains exactly why he feels
that the United States is headed for financial
disaster, and what we can do to prevent it. Many of
the world's leading economists agree with him, as do I.
Except for the low inflation rates of recent years, the
U.S. would be unable today to even pay the interest on our
ever increasing national debt to other countries. What
happens when a business can no longer pay the interest
on it's debt? The banks foreclose. The same would
eventually happen to us, but foreign countries are our
banks, and that day may still come.

If our economy were to fall, many other countries
would fall with us, because the entire industrialized
world is so dependent on our economic well being.
Should there be such a worldwide economic disaster,
couldn't some persuasive leader rise to power as Hitler
did, promising a better life and blaming the Jews--or
the Blacks--or the liberals--or the whites? If this
were to happen today, with our global
political environment, couldn't this leader rise to
world power status? Such a world-wide disaster could
lead to a holocaust that could dwarf the Holocaust that
we know about today. Isn't this what almost every
world prophecy warns us about, including Christian
biblical prophecy?

You might be thinking, "That's impossible.
Nothing like that can happen in America. Why, we live
in the most civilized country in the world!"

Well, if someone would have told the pre-war
Germans what would soon happen during World War II,
they would have said, "Impossible! Nothing like that
can happen here. Why, we live in the most cultured
civilization in all the world!"

We must educate ourselves and our children about
the Holocaust. We can never learn enough. Should the
tell-tale events begin to occur, it is only through an
educated awareness that we can prevent another
Holocaust from occurring in the future. That is why we
must remember the Holocaust. That is why we must
realize the depths of depravity to which man is capable
of sinking. That is why we must learn to shun leaders
who teach anti-Semitism and hatred, no matter how much
good they seem to do in the world. That is why we need to
document as many first-hand survivor accounts as
possible, before these survivors are no longer here to
tell their stories. That is why I feel it is so
important to get Abe's Story into as many readers'
hands as possible.

After reading my father's story, you may feel that
it wasn't as bad as you had thought in the
concentration camps. Well, let me assure you that it
was. It was much worse than we could ever imagine. I
have yet to read a personal narrative on the Holocaust,
including my father's, that fully describes the
atrocities that the survivors experienced. These
atrocities were so horrible, so unimaginable, that most
of the survivors cannot even utter the words, much less
write them down for all the world to see. It would
also make reading their stories too difficult for us to
bear.

Abe's Story, however, is not a story of doom and
despair. It does not focus on the atrocities. Abe's
Story is a story of hope, and of human potential. It
is a story of Life. With this thought, I leave you to
read the synopsis with excerpts from my father's story.